Public Skate
by Black-throatedBlue
Summary: Ice Skating AU: If Regina had had time before finding herself slammed to the ice intertwined with Snow she would have thought 'goddammit, Emma' and tried not to land so hard on her forearm. Instead she finds herself bleeding all over the ice and trying to avoid the hockey Dad who comes to check that she's okay. OQ.
1. Gossip Mill Fodder

A/N: This is more of a prologue, really. More actual interaction in later chapters! Also I apologise in advance for what will probably be some very short chapters. I'm basically writing this story as therapy for a really long, really angsty Evil Snowing fic that I'm writing completely out of order with horrendously long chapters, so advance warning that this will probably also be aggressively fluffy. (I'm not a naturally fluffy person - I worry it just comes off sounding drunk.)

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><p>Chapter 1: Gossip Mill Fodder.<p>

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><p>It all started like this:<p>

Emma's sort-of new boyfriend had a sort-of ex-girlfriend who decided that she'd really love to see Emma skate.

The sort-of ex-girlfriend (Tamara) also had a probably new boyfriend (Greg) who thought it was a great idea, came along with her to the next open competition, and turned out to have had some (undisclosed) bad history with Regina, who was also competing. (Small world.) Somehow, no one's quite sure how, Tamara and Greg teamed up with Emma's other sort-of new boyfriend (Hook) and decided that hanging around the zamboni entrance getting in the way was a great passive aggressive move to generally disrupt the whole area and put a lot of the competitors off.

Gold went to get rid of them but in the process of moving the whole mob through the narrow rinkside space of waiting competitors, Greg managed to shove Emma off-balance, possibly accidentally. Emma was waiting to go on the ice, she was obviously wearing her skates, and unfortunately Henry was there to wish her luck and was, at that moment, unhelpfully sat tucked up against the barrier in the only direction Emma could stumble. Regina was standing next to Emma, saw the impending fall, saw Henry on the ground and Emma's unguarded blades, and moved to intercept, yanking Emma upright and keeping Henry out of harm's way. In the process Regina managed (in her skates) to stand between the matting on both the concrete floor and the metal screws in it, and rumour has it she had a face like thunder to realise it.

The result of all this was that Tamara and Greg were banned from the ice rink, Emma went on to happily win her category, the ice rink gossip mill was temporarily distracted from the customary Regina-Gold cold war, and Regina got a couple really nasty nicks in her blades. (Sharp metal edges do not generally like either rough concrete or competing metal edges.)

Unfortunately the normal guy she got her blades sharpened with was on vacation. The other guys at the same shop were not nearly as good. Frustrated with her blades constantly catching the ice at odd angles (particularly since she attributed Emma's win to her own unexpected fall when she skated directly afterwards) she took a chance with the sharpeners in the rink shop itself, hoping 'Grumpy' couldn't be as bad as had been rumoured. It was true, he wasn't. But neither was he exactly ...good.

Emma was lauded as being a greatest skater the club had; Regina ended up with a pair of overly sharp blades with a somewhat peculiar rocker.

The following Saturday morning Snow (who had been roped in for last-minute skate-guarding on the public session after Ruby had failed to show up, and who had always had a soft spot for the not-always-appreciative Regina) roped Regina in as unofficial co-skateguard on the grounds that Regina seriously needed to blunt her skates in a place where she wouldn't keep getting dirty looks because of messing up the ice, and hey, unofficial or not, Blue in the office would let her do it on the public session for free. Snow herself just wanted any company other than her official co-skateguard Whale, a hockey guy who managed to combine a complete disregard for bad falls with a sleazy over-attention on any teenage girls who happened to show up. Regina was not un-sympathetic.

And so it was, attempting to blunt her blades in her seemingly hundredth show stop of the session, that Regina caught her blade at the wrong angle, flipped her whole body up into the air, and came down hard and unexpectedly and brought Snow with her. If Regina had had time between standing happily upright and suddenly breathlessly finding herself slammed and scratched and entwined with Snow on the ice, she probably would have thought 'Goddammit, Emma' and made more of an effort not to land on her left forearm.

But she didn't.

Instead she and Snow were disentangling themselves and trying to check they were both alright when she looked up to find one of the hockey parents slid to his knees by her side. It was only when she followed the concern on his face and the hand he'd stretched towards her bare forearm that she realised she was dripping a not inconsiderable amount of blood onto the ice.

"Ma'am, you're bleeding," he said, eyes pausing on her face and flicking back to the wound.

"It's Regina," she said, shifting away from him, "and I'm fine."

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><p>Next Chapter: He's great-looking, great with Snows and really great with doors, but also really quite crap at running in skates - it's Robin!<p> 


	2. Saving Face

A/N: There's more focus on blood in this chapter than I originally intended. It's just a graze, but just letting you know in advance.

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><p>Chapter Two: Saving Face<p>

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><p>It is really embarrassing falling over on a public skate.<p>

If you fall over on practise ice literally no-one will notice. It's practise ice: at least one person will be at the stage of a jump where practising it looks like they're actually practising falls. Somebody else will be getting tired and will just give up halfway through a maneuver and gratefully slide onto the ice. Sometimes people have a stupid moment in a step routine, catch a toe-pick and fly over sideways; sometimes people go into a back sit spin, think better of it, and just sit down.

It's normal to fall.

It's good to fall: to be trying hard enough to improve that a maneuver is more important than staying upright (though more often than not you can save yourself). To be comfortable enough on the ice that you're not scared of it, that you can throw yourself into a stupid position and not once have your muscles tense or balance reconsidered in light of just how much it might hurt if you do it wrong. If nothing else, it's good to fall so that you're good at falling. So that when you do inevitably overreach you'll bounce and slide and get straight back up again, you'll never land on your wrists or your head, always twisting to land on the side of a thigh and by preference slide along on it rather than thud down onto it.

On practise ice you won't think twice about falling. (The only thing to think twice about is lying on the ice afterwards, if there's a nearby coach or friend of the disposition to stop fast and hard next to you, spraying you with ice.)

But on a public skate skaters are usually just trying to keep their feet under them. For them, not-falling is in fact, the goal. Teenagers at a Friday night disco skate mock each other for falling more often. Polite acquaintances politely boast how little they fall over these days, in an effort to show you how good they must now be. Non-skating friends will try to gauge your ability by asking how well you can skate without holding the barrier, how long can you go without falling? Worth and quality is measured no longer in clean landings or deep edges but in the clear-cut, oh-so-simple question: how well can you stay on your feet?

So if you're a semi-skateguard, if you have on the non-skate-hire, white boots of this-person-can-probably-skate quality, and with general movement and activity have been attracting the gaze of bored spectators lining the rinkside barrier? If you can easily keep your feet under you and know that you can do so and can do so much more besides that it doesn't occur to you any more than it would occur to the average person on dry land?

It is really embarrassing falling over on a public skate.

It is particularly embarrassing (and annoying) when people then fuss all over you asking if you are alright as though you don't wind yourself or bruise your coccyx on a regular basis. It's a fall, it's only a fall, if you had broken something terribly you're more than capable of yelling.

It is incredibly embarrassing if the person fussing over you is really really attractive.

Of such meet-cutes, rom-coms are made.

Regina is not best pleased.

She slaps an ice-wet hand around her raised forearm to try to stop the dripping and winces at the sting of it. Bad ice-scrape, probably, roughed-up public skate ice skinning her as she slid on it. A trickle of blood itches down to drip off her elbow and she frowns, lifts her hand to scoop up from the elbow and clamps down harder where it hurts, ignoring the way it seeps through her fingers.

"Do you want some help getting up?" the hockey Dad asks, hand still outstretched towards her.

She glances at his hand, his face, his hand again quickly. His gaze is too open and intimate for a stranger so close at such a time.

"I'm _fine_," she repeats.

"Regina, you're clearly not fine," says Snow.

Regina ignores her chiding, leaning up and over and scrambling onto knees and then blades with her arms clasped awkwardly in front of her. It's perfectly possible to stand from a sit and a kneel on leg balance alone even with blades that can slip out from under you and that add several inches to your lower leg not equalled in your thigh, but it's not exactly graceful.

"And yet I have managed to stand," she says significantly, looking down on them.

They meet her gaze for a moment with curiously similar expressions of mild incredulity before the hockey Dad turns to Snow instead. "Would you like some help getting up?"

"I'd be honoured," Snow smiles, and Regina abruptly remembers why she sometimes goes whole months hating Snow's guts.

The hockey Dad is on his feet again in a second and reaching for Snow's gloved hands to pull her up as though they were off-ice. Predictably, Snow's weight at such an angle causes her feet to slide towards his, and it's only luck that Snow doesn't take his feet out from under him, the two of them laughing at the near-accident. Regina stands ignored with a palmful of blood and begins to hate the hockey Dad too.

"Shall I, uh?" the hockey Dad asks, gesturing to Snow's shoulders instead.

Snow nods and soon he's behind her hoisting her up by her underarms and setting her on her feet as you would a child, easy and strong though he's not so much taller than Snow when they stand and the angle is peculiar. They smile at each other when he steps back around and it irritates Regina, Snow bonding so easily with strangers as Regina never seems to be able to. It's a strange mercy that Snow's ascent should have been even less graceful than Regina's but nobody else seems to notice and that is irritating too.

"Why, thank you," Snow says, partially dipping and turning her head and putting Regina in mind of a curtsey. "I'm Snow."

"Robin," he replies, with a nod.

Regina ignores them, peering around her wrist and lifting her right index finger to see how her arm fares, the skin underneath white from pressure for an instant before blood starts to well. She grips it again and lowers it slightly, frowns at Snow for good measure when she glances up to find Snow leaning in for a closer look.

"We should probably get you to the First Aid room..." Snow says, reaching out a hand, her levity gone.

Regina straightens and pulls her arm away from Snow's concern. "It's fine, it's just a scrape. I've got bandages in my skate bag."

"Regina -"

"Hey," Whale pulls up, "saw you go splat, Regina, nice work."

Regina fake-smiles unimpressed at all of them and shakes Snow off. "If you'll excuse me," she says, turning for the main ice exit the far length of the ice from them, pushing off her toe-picks for a lazy, faster start.

Snow calls after her, exasperation clear. "Regina!"

"Five minutes," she throws over her shoulder, and doesn't care overmuch whether Snow hears or not.

It doesn't take long to cross the length of the rink but it seems like much longer than it should. The prescribed flow of traffic is anti-clockwise for the first half of the public skate and the ice exit is on her left, so she has to skirt all the spinners and lessons on the inner circles and the general traffic today is not terribly competent. If she wasn't slightly put-off with the awkwardness of both arms up in such an unnatural position she would probably swerve between them far closer and faster than she ought, terrifying them all, but as it is she decides not to risk it and just meanders through the gaps as they naturally occur.

It seems like the first good luck she's had in years that there are no kids clogging the main exit, and the coddling, photographing parents apparently take one look at her face and her blood before standing well clear. Consequently she slows only slightly - a mild sideways scuff that reminds her alarmingly that her blades are still not what they should be – and jumps off the ice into a fast walk as easily as getting off an unusually fast escalator. The harsh sound of a sharp hockey stop behind her startles her but she ignores it.

Her hip aches something terrible.

She swings by the bleachers to grab her skate bag as she strides to the rink exit, prompting a slightly awkward moment when she realises she has no particular way to carry it. Eventually she hooks it with the lower parts of the fingers of her left hand and tries to tilt it away from her forearm, glad that she still has a carry bag and not a roll-along suitcase.

Then a guy stumbles past her hurriedly, overly bent at the middle, weight falling heavily onto his narrow blades but then falling off them again to the sides of the toes and the heels, lacking either balance or confidence in balance to roll along the whole length of blade in any normal approximation of a run. The effect is not unsimilar to someone completely unused to heels trying to jog in 6-inch stilettos, and Regina watches slightly alarmed as he staggers uneasily to the heavy rink door and heaves it open, adult men trying to run unpractised in skates not a completely unusual sight but always a worrying one.

He turns to face her, holding the door open to the side, and of course - it's the weirdly social hockey Dad.

She stops dead in front of the door. Did he seriously just nearly break his neck so that he could _open the door for her_?

"Sorry," he says quickly, correctly interpreting her expression, "Just thought I'd help – you don't exactly have hands free at the moment."

He nods at her arms and Regina scowls.

"Also, I thought I'd offer you this - " he produces a folded but presumably clean tissue from the pocket of his jacket and holds it out to her. "It is clean, I promise, and might help with the dripping?"

She's fairly sure she's caught the dripping with her hand, actually, but a tissue would be more effective. She doesn't actually have a hand free to take the tissue off him, though. She flexes the fingers currently struggling with her skate bag and he catches on immediately, wedging a foot in front of the door and stretching towards her so that she can grab the tissue with her thumb before retreating awkwardly.

"I already said I'm fine," she says, ungratefully.

He raises his eyebrows for a fraction of second before his face is more properly polite. "Well then," he says, stepping to the side and waving her through the doorway still held open with his foot.

She eyes him but steps forwards easily, twisting her upper body away to reduce her width as she passes him close enough to catch a waft of pine smell from his open jacket. They're close enough that she feels his warmth against her back in the ice rink chill but some contrary instinct makes her take pains to never, not quite, actually touch him, shoulders tilting unnaturally with forearm clasp and bag, hips swaying into the movement. She has enough experience using her body to punish others that it doesn't surprise her when she catches, in the corner of her eye, a blank look sliding over his face, but for once it's not an intentional result and she steps clear quickly.

She turns.

He stands polite and serious once more, propping the door against his back, and when she looks at him he smiles tightly and nods, so different from the more honest version he gave Snow.

She doesn't answer it.

Then he starts and smiles warmly down back into the rink, waving a pair of pre-teen girls through and saying, 'you're welcome,' when they thank him excitedly between chatter. The stalemate clearly over, Regina grips her forearm tighter and starts for the bathroom.

"Are you Regina _Mills_, by any chance?" she hears him call.

She turns her head to glare, shoulders as straight as her arms will allow. "Of course I am," she snaps, and contemptuously continues "who are _you_ to ask?"

She doesn't let him respond.

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><p>In the bathroom she thinks damningly of her ice rink notoriety and throws the tissue - unused - into the hand-towel trash-can. Her life is what she's made of it and if that means random strangers think to know her merely by knowing her name then it is what it is. For now.<p>

She misses Henry.

She finds to her annoyance that the sinks are too small to properly fit her forearm in to get it under a running tap, so she dumps her bandage supply on the side of the sink and wets paper towels with warm water instead. The hot water on her arm hurts as much as she expected it to but she doesn't mind, it's shallow and clean at least and seems to hurt less in the aftermath for the peak of it. The crumbling dried blood comes away as she strokes the sodden paper over it, water running warm and red-tinged down her elbow, fresh blood welling in the wake of it with seemingly inexhaustible supply. She has to twist awkwardly over the sink to keep any from running onto her shirt and the thought that she's probably already got blood on her clothes makes her swear.

She dabs gingerly with a dry paper towel and finds the graze is bigger than she'd thought, which at least explains all the blood, and there are a couple deeper scores which bleed far quicker than the rest. None of her self-adhesive bandages are big enough but luckily she has some gauze left over from when Henry got kicked in the shin last year with a dance blade.

She rips open a gauze packet over the sink and has to wipe blood trails off her forearm again before gingerly holding the gauze in place with the sink edge. She doesn't have any surgical tape on her so makes do with some of the heavy-duty white plastic tape she uses to strap laces down in competitions and beautify heavy scuff marks on her boots. It'll hold the gauze in place, that's for sure, but she dreads to think what taking it off again will be like. Wrapping a cloth bandage around the whole mess one-handed is as tricky as might be expected but with cunning application of chin and awkwardly twisted left wrist she manages it.

It's not as though she's not used to taking care of herself alone, after all.

She twists her left arm a couple of times and clenches and unclenches her fist but is convinced it'll hold. It only has to last until she gets home and then hopefully it'll have formed a scab.

She pulls her shirt straight in front of the full-length mirror by the hand-dryers and is relieved that she can't find any blood after all. On her thigh from when she was sat on the ice, she thinks, poking at a slightly stiff area of fabric, but her leggings are shiny black so it won't show and and mostly lycra so it needs cold wash anyway. Lucky she didn't change clothes after this morning's practise ice after all.

She checks her hair, fully aware that she's stalling.

It's times like this she's doubly glad that she did get Sidney indefinitely suspended from his job, because it may have been for bad reasons and it may be why people like the hockey Dad hate her but it's a lot easier to have moments of weakness when you don't have a guy stalking you through the CCTV and constantly hovering the second you leave the bathroom.

People like the hockey Dad will hate her, though, because she's Regina Mills and in Storybrooke Arena that makes her infamous apparently even among the casual skate-hire folk. She tells herself it doesn't bother her but often, nowadays, it does.

(It's very hard to turn a new leaf when everyone keeps reminding you of the old one.)

In the safety of the empty room she winces - it was embarrassing enough falling before, how much worse now to know her audience probably knew her!

She glares at the sink.

There had been a moment, looking up as the hockey Dad knelt over her (open concern and strong features, strokable hair and confident bearing, careful eyes and a gentle hand) that she had forgotten that he would inevitably hate her. She had forgotten everything, in fact, and was lucky she could find her own name, instantly and overwhelmingly aware of every part of him from his green-jacketed shoulders, broad and well-formed, to his thighs only inches from her own. She finds him attractive, it's simple enough, aesthetic arrest and a long time without a boyfriend and the exotic unexpectedness of a British accent in small-town Maine (Gold's notwithstanding), but she can't remember the last time she was hit by it like that, not with Graham nor with Jefferson. It's irritatingly juvenile and unwelcome, right now.

The whole world had shrunk to the discovery of his existence and it had felt, for that bizarrely long moment, like something preciously tiny and inexplicably like hope.

It had been a relief to be up and away from him.

A small child and mother walk in, the child's ankles flipping dangerously in skates done up far too loosely, and she glances at the wall clock to find it's been more like fifteen minutes than five. If she doesn't leave soon Snow will probably assume her fainted from blood-loss and come look for her with a search party.

She's being ridiculous about everything and she knows it, so she throws the gauze wrapper and tissues in the bin and gathers the unused bandages and tape back into her skate bag.

She leaves the bathroom before the child and mother can know it too.

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><p>Next Chapter: Why it's difficult to ogle someone on a public skate. How Regina has a go anyway.<p> 


	3. Fishbowl

Chapter 3: Fishbowl

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><p>Snow's smile could light up a room when she sees Regina back on the ice.<p>

There's an instant when Regina's mood lifts to see it, when she feels her eyes smile back and her mouth soften, but then she squashes it back down and rolls her eyes.

She has a complicated history with Snow.

Snow's smile shifts to something more indulgent and for a moment Regina feels like a five year old. Perversely she still feels happier than she did before - Snow's good-will must be catching. (Like leprosy.)

"Have you finished your bleeding for today?" smiles Snow, as Regina gently (she's not keen on a repeat performance of her show-stop fall) pulls up level with her.

"Clearly," replies Regina, lifting her bound arm from her body slightly and lowering it again, "It didn't seem worth the full Marat treatment since the nine year olds wouldn't get the reference."

They separate around one such nine year old, trying to walk on the ice as though it were ground and making impressive, if snail-speeded, progress. Fortunate, really, since the nine year old appears to be aiming perpendicular to the flow of traffic, an industrious tortoise trying to cross an icy road.

When they come back together Snow sighs, dramatically.

"And I was hoping to use leeches on you today - some medieval physic to cure you of ill-temper!"

"You'll have to make do with David instead," Regina drawls, still a little bitter, "hope in vain to foster the creation of better brain cells."

Snow looks at her mock-sternly before getting serious again. "It was quite a lot of blood, Regina."

"Nonsense," says Regina, "it can't have been that much - "

They both startle, a sudden scratching and a loud thump sounding directly behind them, the ice bouncing with it and vibrating under their blades.

Regina turns quickly – sometimes people slide well enough when they fall to take out the people in front of them – to find a large-framed guy with a massive beard and massive hair apparently gone over backwards and now spread-eagled on the ice. She and Snow stop: adults tend to go down hard when they fall, especially backwards, where children tend to bounce.

He lies stunned for a second as they approach, but then an Asian guy in a hat scratches to a stop next to him (better in skating than in stopping) and the two of them start to laugh for no apparent reason.

"Are you okay?" Snow asks.

"He's fine," the Asian guy says, still laughing, and helps his friend clamber up.

"I'm fine," the bearded guy echoes, and the two of them set off okay so Snow drops it.

"Is it me or are there more older guys in hats than usual?" Snow asks, frowning.

"I wouldn't know," Regina says.

They rejoin the general flow, ponderously slow as per the speed of the other skaters.

"It can't have been that much," Regina resumes, and clarifies when Snow looks lost, " - blood - because we've skated past that patch of ice several times now and I haven't seen so much as a spot."

"We scraped it off, Regina!"

"So quickly?"

"Whale's surprisingly good with blood."

Regina glances over at Whale, distinctive in an oversized skateguard jacket the far length of the rink behind them as they start the turn. With perfect timing an eight year old belly flops into a painful-looking fall right next to him and Whale doesn't even twitch. The eight year old bursts into tears.

"Oh dear," Snow says lowly, empathy audible in her voice. "I'll go."

Even before Snow gets there the kid is joined by two friends and an adult, so Regina doesn't bother hurrying. The kid is likely shocked and winded and Regina's not surprised she's in tears, but she's unlikely to have done any lasting harm. Regina meanders slowly down the length of the rink towards them but Snow doesn't signal her for the insurance forms so she continues on when she passes them.

She does a couple more show stops (right leg fine, left leg still biting into an unwanted and inconvenient edge), a couple one-footed show stops stopping on the painted lines (much the same), and nearly comes a cropper on an idle t-stop.

She switches to power pulls.

The curves of the one-footed slalom – inside-edge curve, outside-edge curve - cut deep, ice creaking like a tall ship to be cut under the sharp pressure, and though it doesn't help blunt her blades much it at least reassures her that she's adapted to the rocker. She waits for a clear patch of ice and risks switching to one-foot power-rockers, pleasantly surprised when the turns go off without a hitch – outside-edge curve, inside-edge curve, rocker turn, backwards inside-edge curve, backwards outside-edge curve, rocker turn – but upon turning to forwards again she finds herself far too close to other skaters so she stops.

There's not much else to practise with the ice so busy. Blue will probably glare at her for the power-rockers as it is.

She scans the ice idly for the the hockey Dad – curious to know how he skates, that's all, not curious to see if he still has the same effect on her at all - but cannot find him. Maybe she's scared him from the whole rink but she doesn't believe it.

She glances at the clock. Twenty minutes to resurface.

It's a somewhat new experience, having time to kill. Usually with Henry and work she's scrambling for time to skate, not swamped in too much of it with nothing she can practise.

She hopes he's having a good time with Emma, wherever they are, and tries not to fall back into the worry of it. To her surprise, she succeeds in it a little, though that's not saying much. She trusts Emma more than most but Henry is her _son_ and she hasn't heard a word from him since they left after the competition two weeks ago. She misses him.

She looks for Snow and finds her deep in conversation near the music box with a group of five who are even now holding hands in a chain. It's fantastically against the rules and stupid to boot – they seem to believe it will somehow help their stability and not, as is actually the case, best case scenario pull them all down together and worst case act as a trawling fishing net for unwary other skaters with insufficient speed – but Snow in her inimitable way is trying to communicate this without actually telling anyone off.

Regina would just throw the book at them.

She sees a kid revving up to throw ice slough and goes to intercept. She cuts him and his friends down with ten words and an arctic glare and feels a dull triumph that they will not reoffend anywhere near as quickly as Snow's chain will.

They have different methods of leadership, the two of them: barring the occasional revolution, Regina's actually works.

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><p>Regina spots the hockey Dad almost immediately that he gets back on the ice at one of the side exits with a small hesitant set of anthropomorphic hockey gear in tow.<p>

She's already passing by their exit and turns her head without thinking to watch.

Definitely a hockey Dad, then, she thinks, as the hockey gear bats ineffectually at its helmet and firm words appear to be said about the compulsory wearing of it.

She can approve of his parenting, at least.

Then a tall pre-teen kid swoops out of nowhere and manages to fall, limbs akimbo, right in front of Regina. Adrenaline spikes painfully and her heart misses a beat, nowhere to put her feet and no time to stop, no room to swerve. She's forced to hop suddenly on one leg as the child's legs swing towards her, jumps and rotates off of a toe-pick, actually leaps over the child with heavy ungraceful use of her shoulders and thankfully stumbles beyond, vaguely conscious that Snow to her right is doing similarly.

The kid is fine, grinning as his legs slide from under him as he tries to get up. Snow and Regina share a rare speaking look and continue on.

"This is ridiculous," Regina says, rubbing her hand over her heart to lessen the ache.

"You should've seen it last week," says Snow, relentlessly cheerful.

Sometimes Snow is enough to drive Regina up the wall.

"I severely doubt it was as bad as this."

"It was worse," Snow rebuts, "these kids are mostly staying upright. Last week it was two birthday parties and they were practically crawling on the ice, all over the place."

Regina remains unconvinced, but they round the corner and she looks over again for the hockey Dad to her left. She finds him grinning down at his child but a couple of older men in hats skate between them and then a teenager manages a spectacular save, arms waving.

In front of her a kid optimistically wearing a skating dress pushes to her feet and promptly falls down again.

Regina growls.

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><p>It calms down slightly as they draw nearer time for resurface, the less active and less experienced getting tired and hungry and going off-ice.<p>

"Really?" Regina says, disbelieving when 'Bad Reputation' comes on the speakers for the third time that session.

"What?" says Snow, though she knows full well what.

"Your musical taste is appallingly repetitive."

"Well you're welcome to change it."

Regina has every intention of doing so. She leaves Snow and heads for the music box, cutting across the inner circles this time where a couple smaller kids are trying to do shoot-the-ducks (squatting fine but lacking something in the standing afterwards, ie, the actual ability to do so), an older girl practising extremely short scratchy back spins that somehow still manage to travel.

It's easy enough to swerve between them.

When she comes to the music box she finds the hockey Dad near the door for it, bent-over holding hands with what must really be an extremely tiny child underneath all that hockey padding, eyes flickering between child and ice ahead as the child shuffles backwards. It's a terrible impulse but Regina veers sharply so that she will stop behind him, not next to the child, and continues faster than she should, indescribably pleased when she does a fast, hard, sharp hockey stop perfectly right behind him with not a whiff of dissent from her troublesome blades.

The kid's face lights up at the five-foot ice spray on the barrier; the Dad startles, drops one of the kid's hands and turns around to stare.

In her glee she gives him a positively evil smile and nonchalantly steps off the ice.

She can feel him staring at her through the plexi-glass as she grabs Snow's ipod where it's hooked into the sound system and she resists the urge to meet his gaze. She's well-aquainted with Snow's playlists from practise ice so she quickly flicks to a different one without needing to spend much time over it, steadfastly ignoring the child hidden behind the barrier chattering to his open-mouthed 'papa' that the ice spray went '_so high, _higher than him, higher than the moon!' and 'papa, papa, can you teach me?'

For a moment she's not sure what pleases her more, the Dad's distracted platitudes ('yes, my boy, _very _high, but didn't you want to learn backwards skating first?'), or the adorable adoration of the child (Henry had always been an old-soul, difficult to impress even at that age),

When she steps back to the ice-door the hockey Dad is still staring at her, while the child prods in awe at the spray on the barrier with heavy mittens. She flashes the Dad another evil smile - all teeth and triumph - hops easily back onto the ice and is away.

She imagines she can feel him staring at her even as she cuts through to rejoin Snow.

It pleases her.

* * *

><p>When the child skates forwards it makes reasonable speed, not that Saturday morning public skate standards requires much, and the hockey Dad and child keep pace with Snow and Regina for easily five minutes.<p>

They stay a quarter of the rink behind them.

On the straights there is not much for it, but on the corners Regina finds herself looking over her shoulder to keep track of them, the hockey Dad not apparently not noticing in the crush of other bodies. She is lucky he is in distinctive green or she would not find him herself (she frequently loses track of the child) and she wishes it were not both unsafe and conspicuous to keep an eye on them by skating backwards.

It is unsafe and conspicuous enough merely trying to look backwards on the straights.

Still, she sees enough to know him a serviceable skater: he doesn't fall, doesn't lean dangerously, has a good sense of the length of his blades and shifts from foot to foot without unreasonable concern. He's much better than she would have expected, having seen him run, and she finds herself unaccountably disappointed by it.

(She cannot see his face and body much, as people shift around and between them, catches only glimpses of beard and kind eyes under the coldly-bright ice rink lights and wishes her memory of his face immediately post-fall were not so hazy.)

Suddenly paranoid considering the previous hour she's had, she keeps her eyes back where she's skating.

The glimpses she catches of him make her wonder though. Who is he to her, that she should be able to find him in a crowded rink? Why him? What is he like, beyond his mask of serious politeness and his open-mouthed stare?

(What does he think of her, 'Regina _Mills'_, who falls and bleeds and ruins people's lives?)

"So, that hockey Dad..." Regina starts.

"What hockey Dad?" Snow's head twists to watch a tiny hockey kid doing knee slides next to some nervous teenagers.

"The one that helped you up?"

"Oh, Robin!" Snow says, and turns her gaze back to Regina. "Of course. He seems nice."

"Don't you think he's a bit weird?" She fights the urge to check over her shoulder again, to check he's still there, still behind her and not watching her.

"Weird?" Snow exclaims. She slips behind Regina as they weave through a particularly congested patch of people, then comes up beside her again. "What's weird about him?"

"Helping the skate-guards up? He's a hockey Dad on a public skate, not a coach or anyone we know. He wears skate-hire boots!"

Snow laughs like she's said something absurd. "It's only skate-hire, Regina, it's not the mark of Cain."

"But why does he try to help _us_ up?"

"He was just being friendly!"

"And following me off the ice?"

Snow pauses, considers. "Maybe a little weird, but I'm sure he meant well."

"It's not his place to mean well."

"Which I'm sure you communicated to him," Snow says primly. "I wonder what he thinks his place should be, to have risked offering help to _Regina Mills_ and to have been so soundly rebuffed? You know your reputation as well as any, and the truths of it."

Regina sighs.

Snow ducks her head to try to catch Regina's gaze. "I think he was trying to be friendly and I think you liked him, really. It's not everyday someone attractive comes running to help."

Regina scoffs. "Skate-hire boots, Snow. A _hockey_ Dad in _skate-hire_ boots."

Snow throws her a look.

"Besides," Regina continues, raising her chin, "he smells like Ikea."

Snow laughs and the clock turns the hour.

* * *

><p>Next Chapter: Roland is tiny, Little John is not, and the ice heats up (literally) (sorry!).<p>

Also, reviews are awesome, please review! Thank you so much to Cat1030 for reviewing so far! Hope people don't mind substitution of Ikea for forest, but I went with pine last time rather than rotting leaf litter so it seemed to fit. (Also, because I unapologetically love Ikea.)

Btw, the large guy making the ice vibrate is not meant to be a reflection on his size: surprisingly small people can make the whole rink shudder if they tense and bounce to the ice with the right force. It's uncommon but kinda terrifying when it happens – mini man-made earthquakes!


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